Kids don’t like the apps. Shocker.
Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
11–20 of 158 posts
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#12Only if they know about it. That's why my kids only get Android phones. Easy to install hidden services.
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#13When I was a young boy in the 90s, my libertarian aligned father let me use the computer and access the internet. He explained to me that I shouldn't visit certain type of sites, I should never give out my name or address and that he had software installed to monitor what happened on the computer. He explained that this wasn't a breach of trust between us as I was using his equipment and that I had to abide by his ru…
It's not so much about the breach of trust than about raising independent, well-functioning individuals. There's good evidence than sheltering kids and not allowing them to experiment on their own terms, including by experiencing the consequences of their own actions, does not create well adapted adults.
Parents who install monitoring systems are prioritizing their own short-term well-being and peace of mind at the expense of their child's future. They're eating their marshmallow right away.
"My house, my rules" arguments are absurd when it comes to raising kids, and totally disregards the end goal of raising independent individuals.
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#14It strikes me that the parents who install these apps are likely to be parents who are raising more challenging children.
That's not to imply they are bad parents, just that the kid went through a divorce, intense bullying, a change in schools, etc. and that trauma caused them to engage in activities that led to their parents installing the app.
I guess in a phrase have they shown causation?
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#15Here are my results so far:
1. MS Family Safety: can be easily turned off by the child 2. Kaspersky Safe Kids: doesn’t really work at all. 3. Qustodio: doesn’t block apps, so kinda useless. It blocks some, but not others.
I would pay good money for something that does work. As things are now, my 14 yo can only use his computer under adult supervision to do his homework. Otherwise he doesn’t do it at all. I don’t even care what sites he goes to as long as homework is done on time, but he totally lacks any self control, and left to his own devices he will spend all his time playing Minecraft and watching bullshit on YouTube. If he hates me for not letting him do that, so be it.
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#16Trust. But verify.
Step-father of a 12 year old boy here.
We started monitoring his internet after we caught him looking at inappropriate videos on youtube.
He knows he is being monitored and I only block actual porn sites. Neither of us like it but until he has earned our trust back, the situation will not change.
I'm his parent, not his friend. My job isn't to make him like me, it's to raise him with proper values and protect him from the dangers he doesn't yet know exist or may not yet understand.
If I do it right, he will thank me later.
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#17>Both studies, which haven’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal, are set to be presented later this month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems held in Montreal, Canada. Wisniewski says that the research was peer reviewed prior to its acceptance into the conference, though. In CS, conferences are considered just as good as journals.
this is probably the most infuriating thing about academic CS, is condescension from people in every other field about this fact.
It's even more infuriating to work in a country where the rules for decisions (tenure, periodical assessments, etc) are common between disciplines, so non-journal papers are worth around zero, and your whole subfield pivots around conferences...
Common decision in my career: what do I prefer for this paper? That people actually read and cite it, or that it counts for tenure and other career stuff?
Many colleagues I know just change subfield, or pivot toward multidisciplinary work (e.g. with doctors, to be able to send it to medicine journals) just to avoid this.
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#18It is even worse when schools try to make these mandatory “on behalf of the parents.”
It's tricky -- teachers are in loco parentis , so does that also apply to equipment distributed by the school system? At any rate, I know it annoys the kids, but it gets them off to a good start circumventing technological lockdowns. So at least they're learning a valuable computer skill.
One of my coworkers had a bit of battle going on with his son where the son would figure out how to disable/circumvent the device tracking and he would have to figure out some way of doing it.
I'm not sure how it turned out, but at one point he installed an app on the phone that would let him text his son a certain message and it would silently respond with his location.
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#19Monotoring somebody because of your own anxieties is abuse
Re: Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
#20When I was a young boy in the 90s, my libertarian aligned father let me use the computer and access the internet. He explained to me that I shouldn't visit certain type of sites, I should never give out my name or address and that he had software installed to monitor what happened on the computer. He explained that this wasn't a breach of trust between us as I was using his equipment and that I had to abide by his ru…
Except that (assuming you define "young boy" anything like I do, and you live in the developed world) you were not free to get a job, due to child labor laws and mandatory schooling. I can't be too annoyed at your father, since most people don't even see the need to justify parents or teachers exercising authority over children, but if you ARE going to try to philosophically justify it, pretending that a child is just a member of the market economy with the same economic freedom as an adult strikes me as an obviously bullshit way to do so.